i <3 the 90s

There's a whole lot of talk in the last week or so about the Clinton campaign's frequent harking back to the prosperous 90s - from Bill joining his wife on the trail/shilling on Charlie Rose to stump speeches by Hillary reminding everyone of how much richer we all were eight years ago. As Hillary has slumped in the polls and the press corps has churned out plenty of articles and shoddy analysis to explain it, the question of how great the 90s really were seems to be floating in the ether.

The NYT's Matt Bai seems to think that the question about the 90s for Democrats is whether or not Clintonism betrayed progressivism or gave it a new lease on life for the 21st century. This is certainly compelling, but its relevance to 2008 needs to be put into perspective. Within the Democratic party Clinton's legacy is perhaps up for debate - yes, he's very popular, but was his presidency ultimately good or bad for the advancement of progressive ideals? But this question cannot be answered by only thinking within the party's (or more generally, the Left's) paradigm - since the consequences of the Clinton legacy affect the general election.

The fact is, despite his personal popularity, Bill Clinton is a fairly polarizing figure. It's dangerous for Hillary Clinton to run on "a return to the 90s" platform (although it's all she has, which is a major reason I refuse to support her). If the 90s were as heady and wonderful as Hillary likes to remind us they were, then what happened in 2000? Why was someone able to run - and win (sort of) - by basically campaigning on a return to the Reagan era if everyone was so deeply satisfied with the Clintons and the 90s? How did Clinton's heir-apparent, Al Gore, who ran in peace time and before the recession set in, not win a landslide? Even though he didn't win the popular vote, Bush still managed to convince 48% of the electorate that maybe the 90s weren't so good. Sure, a good portion of those voters have their feet in their mouths now, but the fact that 50 million people wanted a change after the 90s casts some doubt on the success of Clintonism, doesn't it?

Maybe my experiences cavorting with conservatives and fundamentalist Christians color my view of people's perception of the Clintons. And maybe Clinton did do a service to Democrats by making progressive ideals palatable to the middle class, and maybe that was entirely necessary to begin the process of moving Democrats into the 21st century, beyond the New Deal and Great Society. But let's not forget that those leaps and bounds he initiated by bridging some of the ideological divide between liberals and conservatives were largely nullified, not by Bush, but by his own decadent and scandal-ridden second term. Bush's election (in 2000; by 2004 the new political era post 9-11 had changed the whole game) was a result of anti-Clintonism - not liberals' ambivalence about it, but the general public's abject disgust with the conduct of the Clinton White House.

This is a central factor in my core of disdain for Hillary Clinton. Her entire candidacy is predicated on the alleged success of the first Clinton Administration, which in my view deserves a great deal of the blame for the mess we've found ourselves in for the last seven years.